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One common example is humans imposing inappropriate gender roles on insects. Often, the colonies of eusocial hymenopteran insects (bees, wasps, and ants) are depicted in cartoons as having male workers, whereas in [[Real Life]], all the workers are female. (The "no male workers" rule applies only to eusocial insects in the order Hymenoptera, however. Termites are eusocial and they have both male and female workers.) Another example is the appearance a blood-sucking male mosquito. Only female mosquitoes suck blood.
Then, there is the matter of spiders being able to hiss. With some species, being able to hiss is [[Truth in Television]], with some tarantulas (like The [
Perhaps the most [[Egregious]] example, though, is drawing insects with four legs instead of the correct six. [[That Guy With
Another example is that, because of [[Small Taxonomy Pools]] and the [[Rule of Scary]], a big arachnid that's not very dangerous in real life (such as a tarantula or an [
There's also the size issue. As in, [[Square-Cube Law|you can't make a functioning invertebrate that is big enough for a human to ride upon/be eaten by/etc.]], [[Rule of Cool|but that never stopped anyone]].
Subtrope of [[You Fail Biology Forever]]. Supertrope of [[Insect Gender Bender]] and [[Four
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{{examples
== General ==
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* An arachnid's limbs are attached to the first of their two body segments (the prosoma) and the insect's the second of their three (the thorax). They are not proportioned or configured like anything remotely resembling a human or a dog.
* Basically, every depiction that isn't attempting to go for scientific accuracy is abysmally, embarrassingly, very obviously wrong.
* What most people refer to as a "wild" beehive is actually a mix between an antique bee skep and a hornet's nest. ''Actual'' wild beehives look like [http://archives.starbulletin.com/1999/08/09/features/artb.jpg this] or [http://www.volcanoislandhoney.com/photos/puako/7-WildBee.jpg this]{{Dead link}}.
* Being arachnids, scorpions have eight legs (the pincers are pedipalps, which are closer to mouthparts than anything), but good luck finding one in TVland with the right number of legs. Made all the more grating because a simple Google search would clear up this misunderstanding immediately.
== Anime and Manga ==
* A filler arc of ''[[Naruto]]'' brings us "bees" that are very obviously hornets (although this is a translation error since the word 'hachi' can refer to either bees or wasps), a 12-foot beetle with a trunk (it trumpets like an elephant, too) and cockroaches which don't look or move like cockroaches.
** Pain's "centipede" summon has what's basically a snake head with fangs tacked onto the sides.
== Comic Books ==
* In-story example: [[Spider
** In continuties with organic web shooters, realistically Spidey should be shooting silk out of his ''ass'' since that's where spiders do so in real
** [[Did Not Do the Research|Spiders don't shoot silk out of their anuses]]. Real life genetic engineering has resulting in goats generating the proteins in their milk, which also doesn't fit the conventions of [[Superhero]] comics. As spinnerets don't have any strong correlations in mammalian physiology, one place is as inaccurate as another.
== Film ==
* ''[[Bee Movie]]'' has male worker bees and a blood-sucking male mosquito named Mooseblood. The insects have four legs.
* ''[[Indiana Jones and
{{quote|
'''Indie''': How big was it?
'''Mutt''': Huge!
'''Indie''': Great.
'''Mutt''': What?!
'''Indie''': When it comes to scorpions, the bigger the better. A small one bites you, don't keep it to yourself. }}
** But later, the characters are attacked by a massive swarm of ants. They are Driver ants, which only live in Africa. [[Misplaced Wildlife|The story is set in South America]]. Also, the ants are shown dragging people into their nests and even forming a biological ladder out of ants just to get to a character hanging from a tree.
*** Driver ants actually ''do'' form structures out of worker ants (like bridges or the bivouac, for instance). They just can't do it quite that ''fast''. Dragging the [[Giant Mook]] back to the nest is pure Hollywood, but using the real driver ant method ([[Nightmare Fuel|slicing off pieces of flesh and carrying those back to the nest]]) would have made it rather difficult to avoid an R rating.
*** The Brazilian translation fixed the name for an actual Amazon
* ''[[Mimic]]'' makes this a [[Zig
* ''[[Eight Legged Freaks]]'': Spiders don't talk. There are a number of other aspects of the eponymous mutants that don't exactly reflect real life spiders(multiple species working together, hissing at prey, practicing kung fu), but the whole verbal expression part kind of overshadows them.
* Surprisingly averted in the remake of ''[[The Fly]]'' involving a mutant Jeff Goldblum/fly hybrid. Like a fly he can scale walls with his hairy sticky feet and must eat his food in liquid form (as flies cannot chew) by vomiting on it.
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* ''[[Salt]]'' has "milking" a spider done wrong.
* ''My Girl'' apparently featured honeybees living inside what appears to be a hornet's nest.
* ''[[A Bug's Life
* ''[[The Mummy
* ''[[
* ''[[
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* Of all shows for this to have happened on, ''[[Kratts' Creatures]]'' screwed it up by showing the view through the critter-cam goggles as a bunch of tiny pictures of the subject when set to "dragonfly". The current thinking is that the images are combined into a blurry composite image.
* In an early episode of ''[[CSI]]'', Catherine is crawling under a collapsed building and comes across a large (at least an inch and a half or so) cockroach crawling on a fallen beam. (Entomologist me: "Cool. Looks like a Periplaneta or a Blaberus of some sort. I wonder what this cockroach has to do with the plot?"). Fast forward to later in the episode where the insect is supposedly identified as a powderpost beetle. (Entomologist me: "Wait, what!?!"). Cockroaches and beetles are in entirely different orders and the cockroach shown on the screen was at least 10 times the size of a powderpost beetle (which is about 1/8 of an inch and much thinner). Using mammals, this would be similar to saying that a lion and a rat are comparable.
* A suspect in ''[[Castle]]'s'' season 2 finale claimed he spent several weeks in Afghanistan with fire ants crawling on his privates. [[Misplaced Wildlife|Fire ants are native to the Americas, not Afghanistan.]] Possibly a subversion, however, as the guy was [[It's a Long Story|only pretending to be a spy]], and probably wasn't an entomologist.
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== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* An aversion occurs in ''[[Rifts]]''. [[The Empire|The Coalition States]], as part of its doctrine of making all of its war machine look scary as hell, employs a number of [[Spider Tank
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== Video Games ==
* ''[[Fallout]]'': The series features various insects and arachnids growing to sizes that would not be physically possible, regardless of their amount of radiation exposure, along with gaining magnificent superpowers, such as being able to breathe fire. Of course, ''Fallout'' is supposed to be a [[I Love Nuclear Power|parody fueled by radiation]].
** The fire ants are an accidental mutation via meddling by [[Mad Scientist]]. It is explained away with the venom glands producing flammable venom that is spark-ignited by the ant clicking its mandibles together. [[Did Not Do the Research|Since when do biological exoskeletons produce sparks by friction?]] Even more amusing, the [[Mad Scientist]] calls the process
** This is lampshaded early on in the first game, when a character notes that the giant scorpions should have their venom greatly diluted, but he is puzzled as to why it seems to remain just as potent.
* ''[[The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim]]'' has [[Giant Spiders]]. That in itself is not that unusual in fiction, but we're talking spiders the size of a small ''house'' in some cases. And they spit poisoned webbing at you. ''And'' they have an additional pair of legs they melee you with. If you're going to make [[Giant Spiders]], could you ''at least'' get the ''shape'' right?
* Oh, god, [[Pokémon]]. Out of at least two dozen arthropod-based [[Pokémon]] (as of Generation IV), exactly ''two'' even have the right number of limbs (ladybug-based Ledyba and Ledian have six, the rest of the insects have four, and arachnid-based ones have six). But then, real arthropods don't generally grow to human size, either (I'm looking at ''you'', Scyther), nor can they shoot their stingers at you (Beedrill). Nor do their shed shells come to life (Shedinja).
== Webcomics ==
* [[Rule of Funny]] example: ''[[The Non
* Apple worms are moth caterpillars. They don't look remotely like earthworms. This fact is apparently unknown to the person who drew this webcomic: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?db=comics&id=1704#comic
== Western Animation ==
* One episode of ''[[Batman:
** And no adult moth eats fabric. They lay their eggs in closets (or did, before the invention of mothballs), and the larval moths chewed on the fabric.
* In the "Turner Classic Birdman" episode of ''[[Harvey Birdman, Attorney
* [[The Secret Saturdays|Munya]] is supposed to transform into a spider/human hybrid, but looks much more like a red ''[[Incredible Hulk]]'' with fangs, claws and four tiny legs poking out of his back.
** [[Fridge Brilliance]], when one acknowledges the arguments often used against the existence of giant spiders. He wouldn't be able to function if he had a more spiderlike frame, so his design instead focuses on the spider's main strengths.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Somewhere This Index Is Crying]]
[[Category:Invertebrate Index]]
[[Category:Artistic License Biology]]
[[Category:Somewhere
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